Scaling and complexity of labor markets: Evidence from Mexican labor micro-data

My first work on the complex dynamics of labour movements captured in administrative large-scale micro-data. My idea was to test whether certain statistical regularities that are prevalent in firm dynamics studies held when using worker flow large-scale datasets.

This paper provides new findings of scaling and power law behaviour in labor markets in the form of wage rigidities, labor mobility, and labor taxonomy ranking. Additionally, it confirms the results, that have been extensively documented in the literature, regarding power laws in firm sizes distribution, firms growth rates distribution, volatility of growth rates, and distribution of personal income. The evidence was obtained for the Mexican economy, making use of a new micro-data set that holds labor information of 400,000 workers and more than 270,000 firms for 12 years in the entire economy. The existence and pervasiveness of power law-type of regularities in seven different dimensions of this social system should serve as a support argument for the use of agent- based modelling, since it is the only tool that is able to capture both the system’s complexity and its empirical regularities.